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Increase The Bottom Line With Deliverability Monitoring

(This post originally appeared on Deliverability.com. You can read original posts from this author, and plenty others, on their site once a month.)

We all know that email delivery is truly (and should be) at the core of many business’s revenue streams. Every quarter, there are many difficult conversations about how deliverability has negatively affected the bottom line at various companies.

Most of the time, these conversations lead to being more conservative on who and how often you email your user base to correct for deliverability mishaps and get back to good standings with your recipients and ISPs.

If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you’re in the room during those talks or know someone who is. As an assist, here’s an alternative point of view that may give you the tools you need to turn those negative conversations on how you’re increasing the bottom line of your email program into positive ones.

What you’ll need

To work on increasing your bottom line through deliverability, you’ll need to gather a few things. For any great planning session, make sure you have all the facts on how you treat your recipients. Some great questions to have answers to:

How often do you mail recipients?

How long will a recipient remain on your mailing list if they haven’t engaged with anything?

What do you do with highly engaged users?

Any other specifics on how you treat your mail program.

These are the normal things you might tweak to ensure you receive the best deliverability. As I’ve written about in the past, deliverability is like a conversation and you’ll need to make sure you’re polite enough to be desired in the inbox.

The last thing you’ll need is a continuous way to monitor deliverability to each of your main ISPs in which you deliver mail to. You can do this coarsely through monitoring revenue or engagement (email opens and clicks) by ISP, but it’s best when you can monitor through seeding mail if offered by your ISP.

What to do

The strategy you should implement next is to tweak each of the control logics for your email program while still striving for 100% deliverability. For instance, since deliverability filtering is customized at each ISP, this program will allow you to treat each ISP uniquely, ultimately allowing you to have tighter control on delivering mail to recipients who want your mail, avoiding delivery to those that don’t want it and avoiding that pesky spam / bulk folder.

In Summary

By no means am I trying to explain a way around ISP filtering. Rather, I’d like to equip you with the tools and metrics necessary to eliminate useless mail and deliver mail to those recipients that want it. Equip yourself with the knowledge and analytics necessary to make smart decisions for your mail programs.

Mike Veilleux is a Director of Product Management at Oracle Dyn Global Business Unit, a pioneer in managed DNS and a leader in cloud-based infrastructure that connects users with digital content and experiences across a global internet.